When I was growing up, my very favorite fruit was apples. They were so delicious — crisp, crunchy and dripping with juice. The best part was their aroma, and they tasted as sweet as they smelled.

Farmers markets weren’t around then, so we frequented the colorful, makeshift fruit stands up and down Pacific Coast Highway, where the apple farmers sat in canvas chairs waiting to sell you the very apples they had picked that morning and the cider they had pressed the night before.

These memories flood back every fall when I splurge and spend $3.50 a pound on my latest favorite apple and it turns out to be tasteless and mealy, not even remotely resembling what I had devoured at the roadside stand.

What’s going on?

To find out, I consulted some experts. Jeremy Manley, 24, is the executive chef/owner of “Jeremy’s on the Hill,” in Julian. It’s a farm-to-table California-style bistro, where every dish is cooked from scratch and almost all ingredients are grown or raised within miles of his restaurant, especially the apples he gets from Down the Road Farms, which is literally down the road.

“Apples are on our menu from August through November, or as long as the growing season is in Julian,” says Manley, who has lived among these small, boutique orchards since he was 10. He grew up eating local, farm-fresh produce grown with integrity, even before he knew what the term “sustainable” meant.

All he remembers is that everything tasted good. And that’s what he expects of all the fruits and vegetables served in his restaurant.

“A chef’s best friend is his farmer,” says Josh Rasmussen, owner of Down the Road Farms. “I grow several varieties of apples, which are harvested at different times. I tell Jeremy which fruit I’ve just picked; he puts a dish featuring them on the menu. If it’s McIntosh, Gravenstein or Jonathans, he starts baking apple cobblers.”

Rasmussen says the apples you find in supermarkets are valued more for appearance than for flavor.

“Commercial farmers are told apples have to look perfect when they’re lined up in the display case, so they’re chosen for their uniform good looks,” he says. “They’re picked unripe instead of being allowed to ripen naturally, because it’s more important that they last 12 days on the shelf or up to a year in cold storage.”

If the best way to eat apples is at room temperature, what does that say about what you might find on the supermarket shelf?

Manley suggests that supermarket shoppers learn the bar codes. “If it’s organic, it will start with a ‘9’ but if it’s from a foreign country, their standards are not the same as ours so you might want to rethink. A ‘3’ or an ‘8’ means the produce has been GMO (genetically modified) and a ‘4’ denotes commercially grown and probably sprayed with pesticide, herbicide or worse.”

So, where have all the good apples gone, and how do we get them back? Pick them yourself right off the tree or, even better, from under the tree — wormholes, blemishes and all.